Suffering and Sin

Every time my body aches and every time my heart aches, I second guess the wisdom of God, because it sure doesn't seem redemptive to me at the moment. Why do trials fit in God's divine plan? How much of our suffering is directly related to our sin, or someone else's sin?

These questions are not new. Jesus faced them during His earthly ministry when He encountered a man born blind. We'll find that His answer was not without controversy, both then and now. In our study of the doctrine of providence, recently we have been concentrating on the problem of pain and suffering that human beings experience and are called to endure that provokes the question within all of us, how could God allow these things to happen? We've looked at some very important biblical passages that address this question. We considered the plight of the prophet Habakkuk. We looked at the story in the Gospel of Luke about the temple of Siloam that fell and crushed 18 people to death. We looked carefully at the book of Job where we have the most expansive study of this question of human suffering and pain. But I would like to look at one more incident that occurs in the New Testament because it sheds light on an important dimension that we face when we ask this question, why? When we're trying to grapple with the relationship between God's providence and my suffering and the relationship between my suffering and my sin. More than once I have been in a hospital room at the bedside of a dying person who has sought me out in order to make a confession. And the confessions that I have heard from the lips of dying people have often included a confession of some deep dark sin for which the person has said to me they are sure is the reason for their suffering and their impending death. Recently in a school that we're involved with, one of the parents came to the administrator of the school and said, I don't want my children to be taught that God ever punishes people.

And the administrator came to me and said, what do we do about that? I said, well, you better not teach the atonement. You better not teach about the cross. You better not teach about the last judgment.

In fact, you better not teach anything about Christianity because we'll have to eliminate the righteousness of God, the justice of God, the holiness of God, and the judgment of God. The reality is, friends, God does punish people, and I think we all know that. Our hope is that He will spare us from that punishment, but we know that if He does punish us, it will be just and holy and righteous. Have you noticed the language that the New Testament uses to describe the last judgment? The universal description of Scriptures about the last judgment is that the response of the guilty will be the same. It will be a response of absolute silence that the lips of the convicted will be sealed, not because they've suddenly melted in their hostility towards God, but because they will see in the final tribunal the absolute futility of arguing against the judgment of God, not the futility that exists because you can't win because of God's power, but because the evidence will be so manifest and so clear and the contrast between God's holiness and our sinfulness so vivid that every mouth will be stopped.

But in the meantime, we complain and grouse about the fairness of God. Now, an event takes place in the New Testament that speaks to this question, I believe, in a most important manner. It's found in the ninth chapter of John's gospel. In the first verse, we read this, Now as Jesus passed by, he saw a man who was blind from birth, and his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?

Now, we could comment at great length about the very question that the disciples are bringing here to Jesus. All that we are told by John is that Jesus was walking down the road, and he looked over, and he saw a man that everybody knew was blind, and he had been blind from his birth. You would think that the question that the disciples would bring to Jesus would go something like this, Master, there's another blind man.

Are you going to touch him? Are you going to heal him? Are you going to restore his sight? Instead, the disciples look at this blind man in his misery, and instead of asking Jesus to do something about the blindness, they make this an occasion for theological lesson. And they come to Jesus, and they say, Jesus, this man was born blind.

Who sinned, the man or his parents that caused him to be born blind? Now, if you are students of logic, you know that there is a fallacy called the fallacy of the complex question, where the question is posed as an either-or situation when, in fact, there may be other explanations. It's the kind of question the prosecuting attorney asks in the courtroom of the defendant, when did you stop beating your wife? If he says never, that means he's continuing to beat his wife. And if he says yesterday, then he's admitting that he was beating his wife.

Instead of asking the direct question, did you ever beat your wife, he loads the question so that however you answer the question, the man confesses his guilt. That's the way the question is phrased by the disciples. They say, the assumption is that there are only two options, that this man was born blind because he himself had committed a sin, presumably before he was born, or the sin of his parents was being transferred to the child. Now, again, there are a host of theological errors and false assumptions in that question, but there is at least one genuine and authentic and sound assumption in their question. The disciples had reduced the possible causes for this man's blindness to two, his own sin or his parents. And they assumed at least this much, that somebody's sin is responsible for this. I think it's a sound assumption.

Why do I say that? Does not the Bible teach over and over and over again that it is through sin that death and suffering come into the world? Can we not safely assume had there been no fall, had there been no sin in the first place, there would be no pain, there would be no suffering, there would be no death in this world. In Eden, nobody was blind. In Eden, no one had boils.

When Adam walked through the garden, he didn't have to worry about temples falling down on his head and crushing him or someone mixing his blood with the blood of the sacrifices they offered to God. In heaven, there will be no blindness. In heaven, there will be no accidents. There will be no tears. There will be no death. There will be no suffering.

Why? Because there will be no sin. And before sin, there was no pain in Eden because there was no sin. So that the Bible teaches us over and over again that suffering and pain and tragedy comes and flows out of the sinful human condition. And it also teaches us that we are in that sinful condition before we're born. And so that we receive some measure of judgment upon us before we have done anything because of our relationship to Adam. Now this is not the place in this lecture to discuss original sin or the consequences of the fall in a theological manner. I've done that many other places.

We have tapes available if you want to hear them. But for this episode, I want to look at this specific man at this specific place at this specific time. And the disciples, however, made the proper assumption that somewhere, somehow, sin is involved in this. But they make a tremendous error when they assume that this person's suffering is a direct and immediate proportionate response of his own sin. The second false assumption they make is that because their parents did something wicked, the child is punished. Now the Bible does teach that the consequences of my sin carry on down through the generations.

And in a certain sense, God visits the iniquities of His people to the third and fourth generation. And yet at the same time, the book of Ezekiel makes it very clear that no child is punished directly for a sin that somebody else does. The only time an innocent person has ever suffered for somebody else's sin was on the cross.

And that was voluntarily when Jesus willingly assumed to Himself the sin of His people and was willing to bear the pain that it deserved. And so we cannot cry before God as the people in Ezekiel's day did, Oh God, it's not fair, the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. And so obviously the disciples hadn't read Ezekiel when they asked this question about the man born blind.

So the two errors they make, again, are in assuming that there was a direct proportion between the sin that the person committed or somebody else committed and the degree of suffering. Those are the only conceivable reasons for which this man is born blind. By the way, the man about whom we're speaking today isn't blind anymore.

You know that, don't you? He enjoys not only vision, but the beatific vision. He is able to view, uninhindered, without cloud and without blur, the manifest glory of God as I speak. And I often wonder if human beings in heaven can observe what we're doing here on this earth and can hear our discussions.

I would wonder if this dear saint who has spent the last 2,000 years in the bosom of Abraham, you know, with perfect vision, I wonder if he's hearing me right now saying, they're talking about me down there. Some people still can't understand why I was born blind, but I sure know why I was born blind. Those few years of darkness made me famous for history because God used that event to glorify Christ, to manifest His greatness.

And every day that man goes to the angel Gabriel, this is pure sprawling speculation now, he goes to Gabriel and says, why don't you send me down there again, let me be blind for another few years so that other people can see the beauty of God. You see, Jesus said, there are other reasons why we suffer besides punishment. Don't you know that the very way of redemption is on the Via Dolorosa? Don't you know that I am a man of sorrows and that I am intimately acquainted with grief? Haven't I shown you and taught you that it's through affliction that we are sanctified, that we are drawn closer to God, that our character is developed, and that my redemptive purposes are such is that you will never, ever, ever suffer in vain? That suffering for my people is always 100% of the time redemptive? Beloved, that's probably the hardest message there is to hear and to believe from the lips of sacred Scripture, because every time my body aches and every time my heart aches, I second guess the wisdom of God, because it sure doesn't seem redemptive to me at the moment. And yet the apostles tell us that we should not think that it is a strange thing when we are visited by affliction, because it's in those afflictions that God works His redemption in us. And though we must endure great tribulation for a season, the apostle Paul, who suffered as much as any human being ever lived, saved for Jesus, said that the afflictions that we bear in the body and in this world are not worthy to be compared with the glory that God has stored up for us in heaven.

But when our focus is on our pain, our focus is on the now and on the presence. And all this man could see at that moment in his life was nothing, a deep, dark blackness. Presumably he didn't even know that this discussion was taking place between Jesus and His disciples. He couldn't see them.

Maybe his sense of hearing had so developed that he could hear the approach of footsteps, and he was straining to get some sense of who was coming. Jesus said, neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him. I must work the works of him who sent me while at his day.

The night is coming when no one can work, and as long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. This man was born blind, Jesus said, so that God could work his work through him. When my associate Bob Ingram was in seminary, he listened to a lecture that a student gave in a New Testament class where the student lectured on this text from John 9, and the student was angry. The student was hostile towards the text and towards its teaching. And in the end, he finally said about this text, he says, this passage reveals a God who is supremely arrogant, a God who in order to manifest his own glory would make a baby blind. I choose to believe in a God far less arrogant than that. I wanted to ask Bob Ingram if when he heard those words, he didn't make sure that he moved his seat as far as possible from the student who said those things.

I wouldn't want to get caught in the lightning because I've heard few expressions of more unvarnished arrogance than that one. It reflected and revealed not the arrogance of God, but the arrogance of the student who would charge God with such a thing. And so Jesus answered the theological questions and when he had said these things, John tells us he spat on the ground and he made clay with the saliva and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay and he said to him, go wash in the pool of Siloam. And so he went and he washed and he came back seeing.

I wonder how long it took him to forget the darkness as his eyes took in the panorama of people and of things before him. He endured his pain for the moment and for all eternity. He has the unimpeded vision of the sweetness of the glory of God. Ephesians chapter 1 tells us that God works all things according to the counsel of his will. Because of that, everything has a purpose and everything happens under God's authority.

So even when we suffer, we know that God's plan is not being thwarted. We are still under his loving care. We'll hear more about that from Dr. Sproul in just a moment.

I hope he'll stay with us. These are difficult things to consider, especially when we are hurting. And that's why we're airing Dr. Sproul's series on Providence this week here on Renewing Your Mind.

R.C. also wrote a book on this topic called The Invisible Hand. In it, he helps us build a biblical perspective on God's providence.

As you read, you'll find comfort in the fact that God controls every aspect of his creation. We'd like to send you the 25th anniversary edition of this book when you give a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. We'll also provide a digital download of the series we're hearing this week, which has 15 messages on the providence of God. You can reach us by phone to make your request.

Our number is 800-435-4343, or you can go online to renewingyourmind.org. And on behalf of all of my colleagues here at Ligonier Ministries, let me thank you for your generosity. As promised, here's R.C. with a final thought. I want to say another word about something we covered in our look at John chapter 9, and that is with respect to the description that God gives about what the judgment day will be like. That when we stand before him and the books are open, there will be silence in heaven.

That is, we will have nothing to say in our own defense. We will see clearly then that all of God's works are not only marvelous, but that they are altogether just, and there is no injustice in his providence. This at times is the hardest thing for the Christian to trust, particularly when we see pain, affliction, illness, and death. There, we need to be silent. As John Calvin once said, where God closes his holy mouth, we must desist from inquiry. Yes, we search the Scriptures to learn of his ways, but sometimes the answers don't come, and there is a time and a place for a holy silence before the sovereignty of God. And Dr. Sproul will help us understand that more deeply tomorrow as we continue the series, Providence, God in Control. The title of the message is Together for Good, and I hope you'll join us for Renewing Your Mind. .